Description

1927 Lou Gehrig Game Worn New York Yankees Jersey. Through a
history that has seen forty American League flags take to the cool
Harlem River breeze that flutters past Yankee Stadium, perhaps no
squad has been more dominant than the 1927 team. With a batting
order called Murderer's Row for obvious reasons, the team delivered
the most devastating three-four punch for its historical context
that the game has ever seen. This is not opinion, it's empirical
fact. Ruth's sixty circuits in 1927 was trailed by Gehrig's
forty-seven. Third place (fellow Yank Tony Lazzeri) was eighteen.
In fact, the duo of Ruth and Gehrig produced more than twice the
home run output of every other American League team with the
exception of the Philadelphia Athletics, who just avoided being
doubled with fifty-six.

Equally staggering are the numbers for every other significant
offensive category. Slugging percentage, total bases, runs scored,
bases on balls, times on base and runs batted in all found
Larrupin' Lou and Bustin' Babe sharing the gold and silver, and
typically so far out in front as to appear just specks on the
horizon to the third place runner. Such could be said for the
Yankee squad itself that season, who carried an Opening Day victory
onward through 154 games, never trailing the pennant chase a single
day and finishing nineteen games ahead of a Philadelphia Athletics
team boasting Cobb, Foxx, Cochrane, Grove, etc. The National League
Champion Pittsburgh Pirates could play nothing but the role of
victim in the 1927 World Series, a Fall Classic many have surmised
the Bucs forfeited in their hearts after watching Lou and the Babe
take batting practice before Game One. It was a quick and merciful
four-game sweep.

Gehrig was once quoted as saying, "I'm not a headline guy. I
know that as long as I was following Ruth to the plate I could have
stood on my head and no one would have known the difference."
Despite the fact that he chose to record his first great season the
Summer and Fall that the Babe knocked out sixty, the headline
writers did not fail to notice the hometown boy from Columbia
University. With one top newspaper man from each American League
city casting a vote for Most Valuable Player, Henry Louis Gehrig
was once again found at the leading edge of a vast divide between
himself and the "also-rans," earning seven first-place votes for a
landslide victory. While the legend of the indestructible Iron
Horse would only continue to grow through the many hundreds of
consecutive games that would follow, the season of 1927 was
Gehrig's announcement to the baseball world that there was another
unimaginably mighty bat in the House that Ruth Built.

Any attempt at expounding upon the tremendous significance of the
pinstriped jersey from that season that we present here seems
silly, frankly. Nothing could be more self-evident to those with
even a passing familiarity with the Golden Age of Sports. Few
garments in the sports collectibles hobby could aspire to the same
degree of importance as this shirt. In every collecting discipline
of historical artifacts, pieces of this relevance are housed almost
entirely in public museums. Certainly the Baseball Hall of Fame
will cross its fingers that a philanthropic soul will offer this
jersey on loan where, even at Cooperstown, it will stand as one of
the premiere pieces in the collection.

And so, without further ado, we'll turn our attentions to the
specifics of the jersey, noting first the fantastic condition that
it exhibits to this day. One should not, however, take that claim
to mean that the jersey is free of wear. The 1927 season was the
second of thirteen that saw the Iron Horse go the full 154 games.
Operating on the knowledge that each player during this era was
issued just two home and two road jerseys, one can reasonably
assume thirty-eight or thirty-nine games of action. It is also all
but certain that either Game Three or Game Four of the World Series
found Lou sporting these stripes, as it's unlikely he would have
worn the same shirt on consecutive days. It also appears that the
jersey may have lived a second life in the minors, as did most
Major League jerseys from this era, and we assume that it was at
this time that the anchoring strap in the tail (similar to the "fat
strap" in Ruth's jerseys) was removed, taking with it a small piece
of the left tail. This minor alteration represents the only
variance between its current state and that of 1927 Bronx baseball
action.

The interior collar finds the historic attribution, an elegantly
scripted chain stitched "Gehrig H.L." that recalls the time
when the strapping young first baseman was still occasionally
called Henry Louis. A "Spalding" manufacturer's tag resides to the
left. In the tail, and mellowed to the same salmon hue as the
personal identifier, is a chain stitched number "46," the jersey's
size designator.

While it is true that there is no year identifier present, nor
should there be, photographic documentation assures the glorious
1927 vintage. As educated jersey collectors are well aware, the
pinstripes of a Yankee home gamer create a unique "fingerprint." No
two are the same. This "pinstriping method" has been used to date
and authenticate several of the most significant Yankees jerseys in
the hobby, from Gehrig's 1939 "Luckiest Man" shirt, to Maris'
sixty-first home run gamer, to the 1933 Babe Ruth All-Star Game
worn jersey we presented in our October 2006 Signature Auction.
Note the pinstripe that extends directly through the button path,
and the unique intersections of lines at the jersey's collar. If a
picture tells a thousand words, two of those words are
unquestionably "1927 Gehrig."

The jersey was on display at the new Yankee Stadium's museum for
the entirety of the 2009 season, where it was able to share in yet
another World Championship exactly seven decades after an ailing
Gehrig celebrated his last. It is also prominently featured in
Stephen Wong's acclaimed hardcover study of the hobby,
Smithsonian Baseball: Inside the World's Finest Private
Collections, commanding a full page (pg. 84) photograph and a
smaller inset photo of the collar area (pg. 97). The latter just
precedes a segment that discusses the "pinstriping method" which
allows Yankees home jerseys, such as this one, to be definitively
authenticated through vintage photography.

As a final thought, we'll point to Gehrig's slugging percentage in
1927 of .765, the highest production of his Hall of Fame career. In
the entirety of baseball history, this figure has been matched or
surpassed just six times-three each by Babe Ruth and Barry Bonds.
Not Mickey Mantle, nor Ted Williams, nor Willie Mays, nor Hank
Aaron ever registered a season with such a devastating offensive
assault. And when we consider the larger historical context in
which this groundbreaking achievement was realized-the most storied
season in the history of the New York Yankees-we might begin to
realize why many hobbyists consider this jersey to be among the
finest baseball artifacts in private hands. LOA from Heritage
Auctions.